1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the safeguarding of personal information in electronic commerce transactions. More particularly, the present invention addresses the privacy concerns of consumers in the electronic marketplace by limiting access to package delivery information.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advent of electronic commerce over the Internet has spurred economic development by fostering new products and industries and revitalizing old ones. Electronic commerce has also brought an unprecedented array of choices to consumers, who now can make purchases without regard to geographical or political boundaries. However, the increasingly global interconnectivity making such electronic commerce possible is fraught with potential dangers to the consumer. One such danger is the misuse of personal and financial information. Indeed, each time that a consumer makes an online purchase from a vendor over the World Wide Web (hereafter “Web”), he or she typically must supply the vendor with personal information, such as his or her name, address, telephone numbers, email address and financial information such as a credit card number, for example. Often the consumer is also invited to supply other information, such as annual income, number of dependents, etc. Such information tends to be persistent, and is usually stored in databases (whether such database belong to the vendor, credit agencies or other vendors) and may be used for purposes wholly unforeseen by the customer at the time of the original transaction. Individual consumers are not the only ones that may be harmed by such practices; businesses also have an interest in protecting their business information, be it customer lists, key suppliers and the like.
Even if the online purchase, however, is somehow made in an anonymous or quasi-anonymous fashion (that is, without divulging personal or financial information to the vendor), the vendor typically must still ship the package to a delivery address, which may be the purchaser's home or business address or the address of a customer, friend or relative. This information, then, must be given to the vendor who then may store the supplied information for later use or misuse.
Some of the potential consequences of providing such addressee information to the vendor are discussed with reference to FIG. 1, which shows a conventional method of shipping goods from a vendor to a customer. As shown therein, the customer makes an electronic purchase at S11, and is invited to provide the vendor with his or her personal and financial information, such as payment information (credit card numbers, for example) and personal information such as telephone numbers, physical and/or electronic addresses (email address, for example) and shipping information, as shown at S13. At step S14, the vendor processes and stores the supplied information (typically in a database, as shown at reference numeral 10 in FIG. 1). The vendor then packages the goods purchased by the customer, applies a shipping label to the package and surrenders the package to a shipper or freight forwarder (such as the US post office, UPS® or FedEx®, for example) for delivery to the customer 12.
However, the effects of supplying the vendor with the above-listed personal and financial information are not confined to the underlying purchase. Indeed, as shown in FIG. 1, the vendor may itself send the customer 12 unwanted email, subject the customer 12 to unwanted telephone solicitations, or send the customer unsolicited commercial mailings (commonly referred to as “junk mail”). More egregious still, the vendor may sell the customer-provided information to third parties, collectively referenced in FIG. 1 at 14. The vendor may also sell aggregate customer information—that is, information that does not identify any particular one customer, a relatively benign act. However, the vendor may also sell his or her customers' individual personal and financial information to third parties 14, without the consent or knowledge of the affected customers. In turn, such third parties 14 may also subject the customer 12 to a barrage of unwanted emails, solicitations and/or junk mail. The customer, if a business, may have business reasons such as the preservation of trade secrets, for wanting anonymous shipping. Such unwelcome intrusions are, however, but a few manifestations of the universe of all possible deliberate uses and misuses of personal and financial information. Indeed, the customer's personal and financial information may be purchased or intercepted by parties wholly unforeseen by the customer and used for illegal purposes, such as to facilitate identity theft, for example. This problem is exacerbated by the increasing proliferation of e-commerce vendors and Web sites, each of which collects and uses the customers' personal and financial information.
However, even if the actual purchase is somehow made in an anonymous or quasi-anonymous fashion (akin to a face-to-face cash transaction, for example), the package containing the purchased goods still must be delivered to the customer or other addressee. In turn, this entails that the name and address of the recipient of the package be provided to the vendor, with all of the above-detailed potential consequences of providing such information.